Well, not exactly. I have been bearish on how many commerce transactions stores on Facebook would generate since the concept of “f-commerce” was introduced, but that doesn’t mean retailers should give up. Instead, they should put their Facebook stores in the hands of their marketing and promotions staff and prioritize marketing objectives over sales.

I have described before how storefronts built on Facebook pages face at least two significant challenges. Most e-commerce arises from directed shopping that exploits the Internet’s searchability and price transparency rather than the impulse purchases a buyer might make on a social media site. And I have also suggested some ways to accelerate Facebook storefront success: in-stream promotion, social commerce integration and ties to brick-and-mortar loyalty programs. Plenty of smart companies are implementing the first two, but they are still thinking too hard about sales volumes. Just like daily deals, f-commerce efforts should initially concentrate on customer acquisition, engagement and loyalty.

That approach makes sense, but it oversimplifies some issues. “Frictionless” sharing doesn’t show up in Facebook’s main news feed but rather off to the right, in the live ticker. That means those kind of shopping activities may be quick to appear, but they will also disappear just as speedily and likely won’t be called to a user’s attention by Facebook’s ranking algorithm. In contrast, Ticketmaster and Lucasfilm encourage their customers to pass the word — leading to new customers — and actively engage in logical social activities like group travel-planning or event-planning.

And friend-to-friend sharing faces other scale issues: Payvment concedes that most users don’t have enough friends to deliver the kind of volume that big retailers want. So it is promoting the idea of a “taste graph” that aggregates interests — as described by Likes, Wants and Owns — across strangers as well as friends. That would enable offer targeting and the personalization of Payvment’s mall of Facebook stores. It is an intriguing big data play, but companies like Groupon and LivingSocial, with far more resources and data than Payvment, have yet to pull off customized targeting that would improve sales conversion. These are longer-term payoffs.

Meanwhile, retailers looking to get the most out of Facebook for the next 18 to 24 months should reassign some of the merchandisers and retailers working on their Facebook storefronts. They should move staff in marketing, promotions, advertising and customer acquisition onto the job. The measure of their success will come from metrics like new customers, visit frequency and brand lift. That is where advertisers and marketers have expertise. Then two years down the road, the retail experts can start thinking about total sales, conversion rates, cost of sales and other transactional measurement.

Question of the week

How else can retailers use Facebook?

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This is David Card's personal blog. I get paid to think about the intersection of media, technology and consumer behavior. Fun, huh?